About Mum

So. Back to Mum's health. It's not good. This last lot of chemo was really only to try to delay the inevitable. The Drs were going to give her a bout of drugs about once every 3 or 4 weeks for maybe 4 or 5 months and see how it went. But the first try hit her so very hard that she ended up in hospital for 5 days with a white blood cell count of zero. This is not uncommon, but to cut a long story short Mum has decided that she'd rather have a few short months to live and feel tired and ill than have a few short months to live and feel utterly atrocious.

So Mum's decided to stop the chemotherapy. She can take it up again whenever she feels like it, but I don't think she will. She looks so frightened of it when she talks about it.

Hard as it is to watch her dying, I think she's made the right choice. Don't know what I'd do in her situation, but whatever will make her happy over the next few months is what she needs to do. My emotions about it are a bit detached at the moment. I have days where I'll be hanging out the laundry on the clothesline or whatever and suddenly I'll be bawling my eyes out because I'm going to miss her so very much. But mostly I veer away from the abyss. Right now I can only deal with my grief in little packets.

But that's okay - loss is not something you ever get over - you just find a way of making it a part of you so that you can keep getting up each day. I don't really believe in 'closure' or 'moving on' from something so big as this. 'Closure' seems to imply that you're somehow finished with your grief and your memories, and that just seems wrong. I will always miss my Mum. There will always be a Mum-shaped gap where she should be.

In a way that's kinda comforting.

But not very